Apologies for the dearth of recent posts. I’m working a lot on other projects in my off time. For now, I am going to suggest reading the essay Lies We Tell Kids by Paul Graham. Plenty of things to think about, you probably won’t agree with them all, but that’s why we read, yes? Plenty of pithy snippets, but I’ll highlight this one:

If parents told their kids the truth about sex and drugs, it would be: the reason you should avoid these things is that you have lousy judgement. People with twice your experience still get burned by them. But this may be one of those cases where the truth wouldn’t be convincing, because one of the symptoms of bad judgement is believing you have good judgement. When you’re too weak to lift something, you can tell, but when you’re making a decision impetuously, you’re all the more sure of it.

Go read it.

“History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.”
-Karl Marx

I have long been trying to decide where the natural philosophy of Children, or perhaps my children, falls.  I am certain they are not strict Nihilists, Rationalists or Empiricists, which I find notable. I do pick up some Descartes from the eldest, but I probably see more Existentialism from them than any other single school of thought. Some Platonic concepts show up too.  For example, children’s ability to use experience with, say, trees to learn to identify other types of trees, and distinguish them from shrubs reminds me strongly of Plato’s World of Forms, or at least a parallel psychological construct.

I am very interested in input on this topic, so please let me know what you think.